It's tempting - autistic people struggle with eye contact, psychotic people often feel watched. Autistic people don't always have a shared social attention, psychotic people see conspiracy where everything is connected.

I think ultimately he's captured some aspect of the autistic experience for sure, but I'm not sure it's the full experience. It perhaps feels more appropriate to say, the scale from hypomentalism to hypermentalism seems to map to an actual variance in modeling, between or even within people.

@mykola It’s interesting theory, but I think it also kind of falls apart in that autism and psychosis aren’t diametrically opposed; they’re frequently comorbid. (I’m autistic and likely schizoaffective, and depending on where I am in that I can fall all over the hypo/hyper spectrum.)

@mdmarron he talks about this, I didn’t fully grok it but he seems to feel like both traits can exist in one person. That this isn’t a person-level distinction but rather one at the level of specific cognitive tasks.

@mykola Because it enrages me so much that people believe this hateful shit and share it as fact, for now i will simply say that you're using "science" to claim that this [autistic] person is not a human and shouldn't be treated as such, that at best we're faking it, that we're just bodies, and never believe our feelings because we're sub-human monsters. you'll perhaps note that ableism is at the root of many/all -isms. Fuck all that shit.

@dirething so, as an autistic person myself I can deeply relate to the idea that I don’t model the subjective internal state of other people the way others seem to. I did learn how, eventually, but it wasn’t intuitive and that led to a lot of challenges as a kid.

I don’t think that saying “one common autistic trait is different modeling” is ableist, and hypo-mentalizing in this case is no more dangerous or bad than hyper-mentalizing - both failure modes of perception. No?

@mykola I don't buy that allistics even do that, but I'm a number of minorities at once and experience first-hand people being full of shit about their modeling of myself. It's definitely upholding allistics as more human over us. For what it's worth, I thought theory of mind totes made sense until I learned more about it.